Looking at my Twitter just now I see that I'm in very good company as no lesser figure than the Archbishop of Canterbury was delivering a lecture in Southwark recently on the need for us to act not just internationally but locally too. And I guess that's the point of it: small actions can add up to make a huge difference.
Horticulturists tend to have a fairly solid grounding in recycling and caring for the environment - so I guess that I'm a little further along the line than many. However: that said, our recycling habits at home over the past three months have had a dramatic effect: where previously three black plastic bags sat on the pavement each Wednesday, only one now sits and that is often not full. Our green waste from the garden goes out once a fortnight, plastics (Nos 1 and 2 ONLY I've now learnt) every intervening fortnight and so on.
This autumn has been in my mind very dry and this does not, unfortunately, bode well for watering next summer. Green manures and mulching with this last summer's annuals and any other green waste will help to cut down the amount that borders need to see them through. Our own garden has never had any bought mulch added - benefiting hugely from the deciduous nature of most of the shrubs and silver birch tree.
Sitting through today's presentations, though, made me realise just how much of an uphill struggle we now face: we think we're being green by handing out cotton shopping bags (recyclable of course!) to replace the ubiquitous plastic carrier bag and yet nobody stops to think where that cotton came from (southern England?) nor the hefty toll that cotton tends to take out of usually quite marginal agricultural soils in the Third World.
Dreamer that I am, I pause and wonder too about the impact of us suddenly all changing the consumer habits of our particular generation. Trade with the Third World would dry up causing a return to crushing poverty and the atttractiveness of socialism, the air travel industry would falter and our coffee shop culture disappear.
I am conscious,though, too of just how privaledged we all are living in Europe. "Stop destroying the climate" we lecture as we sip our coffees, chat on our mobile telephones, surf the internet on ever smarter and lighter computers and get stuck into ever cheaper meals. Thank goodness the Third World's environmental crises and climatic disasters are never closer than the television screen in our sitting rooms . . .
